The election of Donald J. Trump reaches to areas beyond politics. It shows a cultural shift against globalism and the farther-Left-than-moderate neoliberalism which drives it. It also shows a population adapting to the diversity agenda of post-WWII by formally adopting identity politics, decoupling self-interest from altruism.

First it makes sense to clarify what the election was not. It was not the election of a radical conservative ideologue. Nor was it a vote of confidence in the conservative parties who first opposed the nomination of Mr. Trump in favor of more moderate, neoconservative candidates. This was a man seizing an opportunity that was undervalued, as Aaron Renn observed in City Journal:

“But Trump’s win was no fluke. He has been talking about running for president since at least 1988, but never pulled the trigger. This time around, he saw the opportunity and went for it. A shrewd entrepreneur, he saw a vast sea of unhappy voters who wanted fundamental change to the status quo—particularly on trade, immigration, and interminable foreign wars, and he was able to disrupt politics by re-segmenting the political market to serve it.”

Over the past thirty years, conservatives have been unwilling to attack the core of Leftism as expressed in its class warfare and diversity programs. Leftists want to create an egalitarian Utopia, and to do this requires mobilizing every person by ideology.

That in turn requires eliminating any competing values systems such as the family, religion, heritage, culture, class and national identity. They are fanatical on this point because Leftism is fundamentally unstable, and so any competing — even non-hostile — belief must be subverted and dominated. Leftism pursues power fanatically because the more Leftism penetrates, the less it can hide the failure of its policies, and needs an army of ideological zombie useful idiots and authoritarian leaders to enforce itself.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Leftism took a new turn: it decentralized and hid its power so that to an observer, it seemed as if society were sliding inevitably Leftward as a result of Leftist ideas working when in fact they were failing. When Barack Obama said that Angela Merkel was “on the right side of history,” this is the myth he was exploiting.